Category Archives: Environment

Trump puts another fox in charge of another henhouse. Here’s the Trump appointee who is in charge of drilling safety at the Interior Dept:

“Not all the good ideas in America come over the banks of the Potomac River,” Mr. Angelle said at a meeting in Houston in September that was sponsored by an affiliate of the American Petroleum Institute, the large industry lobbying group, and attended by a reporter. “To the degree this industry wants to be part of the discussion, tell me where you want me to be and we will be there,” he said, evoking applause.

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One month into the Trump era, the number of new jobs in coal mining remains steady, at zero.

Now comes word that employment in the oil patch is declining and not coming back. The problem: automation.

When will we figure out — and acknowledge — that these industries are dying a natural death. There is no need to look for scapegoats like liberals, regulators, environmentalists. Congress should act quickly to flood the states dependent on coal and oil with money for income support and for retraining those folks for decent jobs in renewables or in other fields.

Near the head of the line of interest groups who supported President Trump in the election and who now want favors is the coal industry. In the first few days of the new Congress, both the House and Senate wasted no time in giving a green light to surface mining companies to resume their dirty ways. Both houses have passed legislation to reverse the “Stream Protection Rule” — which does pretty much what it says. But evidently, that regulation was just too burdensome for the coal industry.

Make no mistake: the pollution that results from lifting this rule will not harm the “coastal elites” who opposed Trump in the election. No, the pollution will go into the streams in Coal Country, where voters (well, white ones anyway) voted for Trump in big numbers. He is literally fouling their waters.

With friends like that, does the white working class really need enemies?

Trump at a campaign rally last October in Pennsylvania. Photo by BU alum Dominick Reuter, AFP/Getty

This week in fossil fuels brings a front-page story in the NYTimes reporting on a fiasco in Mississippi to spin straw into gold: a giant “clean coal” project that failed.

If anyone still thinks coal can be used cleanly, here’s a tip: pick up a lump of coal sometime. Carry it around. Try sharing it with others. Put it under your pillow. Go into a small room with the windows closed and burn it.

You will be sick of it in less time than it takes to read that Times story.

The world cannot stop mining and burning coal fast enough. Just stop. There are other ways.

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Even the Saudis get it: fossil fuels are ready for the dustbin of history.

One of the rising princes in the House of Saud announced this week that his oil-dependent nation is taking steps for life after oil. Some Saudis may actually have to develop skills and do work that the rest of the world values; some may even have to pay taxes. (In fact, my hope is that all Saudis soon have to pay taxes, as the government’s share of oil revenues declines. That way, Saudis will feel a growing sense of ownership over their own government. As it is now, the government can tell its people to get lost, because they don’t pay for it. In the future, the Saudi people may come to resent a regime of taxation without representation. They may even decide to overthrow the whole rotten system.)

–BP reported quarterly losses of about half a billion dollars. (Remember that p.r. slogan “Beyond Petroleum”? They might want to bring that one back and say it with feeling next time.)

–And China (usually tied with India for worst polluter on the planet) has decided to put the brakes on more coal-fired power plants.

All of which makes me wonder: How long before Obama pulls back his “all of the above” energy policy and declares that the faster America moves into renewables the better it will be for the planet and for the U.S. economy?

Recently, I had the chance to visit one of the great destinations in the world — the Galapagos Islands, the equatorial archipelago in the Pacific made famous by the visit by Charles Darwin in 1835. Like many people, I have wondered about the Galapagos ever since first reading On the Origin of Species in college.

This trip was also a personal pilgrimage, to survey the place where my father-in-law, Army Lt. James W. Fishel, served during World War II. He and his men never surrendered an inch of territory to the Japanese (who did them the favor of not showing up).

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Thanks to the NYTimes, we know a little more today about the doings of the Koch brothers — the secretive billionaires who are using the Citizens United ruling to spend unprecedented amounts of money to affect U.S. politics and policy. A major theme appears to be advancing their corporate interests by discrediting government, which attempts to regulate the fossil-fuel businesses that the Kochs profit from.

According to the Times:

Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and who believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country. The Kochs, with billions in holdings in energy, transportation and manufacturing, have a significant interest in seeing that future government regulation is limited.

It occurs to me that there are countries where those very industries — energy, transportation and manufacturing — are encouraged and liberated from regulation. A paramount example would be China, which has achieved tremendous growth rates by unleashing those sectors.

But what China and the Kochs do not want to talk about are the social costs that de-regulation imposes on society. Here is a photo I took last year in Xian — a large city in China’s industrial heartland. Bear in mind, this was not taken on a cloudy or rainy day. It was just a normal day in China, with air so thick you could not read a cease-and-desist order through it.

A reminder: Spending money ≠ speaking.

To Messrs. Koch, I ask: can we keep our (relatively) clean skies, please?